North America doesn’t have a monopoly on the ending of unhappy marriages, or in the complications they bring. In A SEPARATION, writer-director Ashgar Farhadi confronts audiences with a domestic drama mired in both the pain of a separation and in the religious strictures of Iranian society.

Nader (Peyman Moaadi) and Simin (Leila Hatami) are a middle-class couple who have reached an impasse – Simin wants to leave the country with their 11-year-old daughter, Termeh (Sarina Farhadi, but Nader insists that he must stay in order to care for his Alzheimer-afflicted father. Not allowed a divorce by the presiding judge, the two separate instead, leaving Nader to hire Razieh (Sareh Bayat), a lower-class worker, to care for his father. But with a heavily pregnant Razieh not having obtained her husband’s expressed permission, and the implications of working for a man who is essentially without a wife, the situation soon escalates beyond anyone’s control.

A powerful portrait of domestic strife in a culture ruled by restriction, A SEPARATION won the Golden Bear at the 2011 Berlin Film Festival, the festival’s highest award.